Watching a lot of the Olympics has gotten me wondering: how are teams so good at what they do? Watching the American women’s soccer team, Dutch field hockey, and even the French handball teams, there’s something to be said for talent, and perhaps something for coaching.
But what I have noticed is how a team’s overall culture — from development, to selection, to competition — figures into all of this.
One year ago, for example, a lot of ink (and megabytes) exhaustively told the tale of a U.S. women’s national soccer team that had somehow lost its way. Whether it was “pay-to-play,” the willingness of individual players to promote their own brands, the quixotic coaching of Vlatko Andonovski, or an aging team, everyone had their own opinion about where things had gone wrong.
And yet, we’re sitting here with an American women’s soccer team looking to win its fifth Olympic gold medal on Saturday after two thrilling overtime games in the knockout stages.
Sure, this is a young team with quick and agile players on the front line. There’s a rock-solid defense led by Naomi Girma, who is likely set to play another decade and a half as a leader for this team. There’s goalkeeper Alyssa Naeher, who has been great in helping Girma organize that defense.
Sure, you can talk about the talent on the field, or the ideas of head coach Emma Hayes.
But I go back to the team culture that was instilled in this team back in the late 1980s. When Anson Dorrance began coaching the U.S. women’s national side, he instilled an all-for-one, one-for-all ethic in his players.
“What we are consciously trying to do is to construct real connections where our players, emotionally, play for each other,” Dorrance told the University of North Carolina’s University Gazette back in 2017. “And this stuff works.”
You know what? It still does. And there are a lot of teams out there who could take a lesson from a coach and the team he started on this journey of nearly 12,000 days, one in which the United States held either a FIFA or Olympic championship for nearly 11,000 of them.
